Playing Dead, Women of the Whites, & Half Wild

Today on the show, a writer explores the greatest escape plan: pseudocide... We'll hear about the global disappearance industry that plots, facilitates and forges documents for fake deaths - and the investigators who track them down.

And musician and author Robin MacArthur talks about her debut collection of short stories called Half-Wild, weaving tales from an untold side of Vermont, where double-wide trailers sit alongside swanky second homes, and old hippies and homesteaders carve a life out of the wilderness.

Listen to the full show. 

Elizabeth Greenwoodwas feeling overwhelmed. After quitting her job teaching in a Bronx public school, she was back in school -- with a new student loan piled onto a mound of undergraduate debt. She was sharing her fantasy of escaping to Belize when a friend joked that she should just fake her death. That got her thinking, and then fairly obsessed with how and why people commit "pseudocide"... The ultimate ticket to a fresh start.

Elizabeth discovered a global disappearance industry that plots, facilitates and documents fraudulent deaths. She spoke to people who tried to pull it off...investigators who track fraudsters down...and to those left behind to pick up the pieces.  Her new book, Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud plunges into the mechanics and desperation that make ending a life appear to be an act of survival.

New Hampshire's White Mountain range is rugged country. A vast wilderness where hunters, trappers and drovers roamed...man's country. An ongoing exhibit at the Museum of the White Mountains reveals that the region was also a proving ground for women. Taking the Lead: Women and the White Mountains uncovers the lives of female pioneers who helped make the region more welcoming  to visitors, and helped shape its development and  preservation.

  The characters in Robin MacArthur's stories live in a slice of Vermont where mobile homes molder and barns sink into the sod, where the abandoned fields of burned-out dairy farms sit alongside swanky second homes. There, hollowed-out hippies and solitary loggers cling to their land.

And over the forty years covered in her new collection of stories they and their children resign themselves to waiting out the days or dream of leaving.

Robin MacArthur lives in Vermont, where she and her husband make music together as Red Heart the Ticker. Her debut collection of stories is called Half Wild.